(Image source: Gabrielle Le Roux/The Feminist Wire)

After serving as a Catholic priest for more than a decade, Sally Gross learned at age 40 that she was intersex. Her therapist recommended that she experiment living as a woman, so she took a year of leave from ministry and adopted the name Sally. Living as a woman complicated her vocation in the priesthood. The Catholic Church only permits men to serve as priests. To protect the Church from scandal that might come if the press learned about an intersex priest, Sally quietly and brokenheartedly left her religious community.

Born in 1953 to a Jewish family in South Africa during apartheid, Sally was designated male at birth. Decades later, when she shared her medical discovery of being intersex with her father, he seethed with rage: How could the mohel—the person who performed the ritual circumcision—have been so foolish as to attempt to circumcise a baby girl? Sally corrected him. She had not been born male or female. Sally was intersex. In her words: “This sets the context for my life history.”

Intersex is an umbrella term for variations in sex or reproductive traits that can present in a variety of ways. Someone might have internal reproductive organs, chromosome patterns beyond XX and XY, hormones beyond “normal” ranges, gonads, and/or variations in genitalia. Like Sally, some intersex folks do not learn about their circumstance until adulthood. Under different names, intersex has historically been pathologized.

Many intersex infants and children have suffered the harmful effects of unnecessary “normalization” surgery—to make bodies definitively male or female. Intersex infants are generally healthy because intersex traits are natural human variations, not disorders. In rare cases, such as Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, medical intervention is necessary. Sally’s position on infant intersex surgery was clear. She asserted that: “surgery isn’t really about the child’s health but about protecting society from the child’s ‘unacceptable’ body.” She also maintained that: “the problem occurs when doctors see a clash between a child’s body and the social body, and they choose to address the clash by changing the child.” Intersex adults report that unnecessary surgeries have caused decreased sexual function and pleasure, urinary tract infections and incontinence, scarring, infertility, and emotional trauma. Activists like Sally seek to end non-essential surgeries on intersex infants and children.

After leaving the priesthood and her religious community in England, Sally returned to South Africa and eventually became a globally recognized intersex activist. Her extraordinary journey speaks with particular urgency today. My book, Body Problems: What Intersex Priest Sally Gross Teaches Us About Embodiment, Justice, and Belonging goes beyond a biography to present her as a guide to readers seeking to discern their role in civic life. She felt her interreligious commitments—as a Catholic who did not renounce her Jewish identity and who incorporated Buddhist practices into her spiritual life—demanded ethical action in the world, which sometimes entailed civil disobedience.

Sally had attended rabbinical school as a teenager. But by her mid-twenties, she chose to be baptized in the Catholic Church in large part because of their anti-apartheid activism. She believed that Jews occupied an ambiguous, conditionally-white status under apartheid’s racial hierarchy, granted some privileges but still vulnerable. Joining Catholics empowered her to participate more publicly in acts of civil disobedience against an unjust regime. Her decision offended family members. But for Sally, becoming Catholic did not entail renouncing her Jewish identity. She saw the two as compatible.

Anti-apartheid activism was a major focus of Sally’s life. As a result of her collaboration with communists and the African National Congress, both of which were illegal at the time, she fled South Africa. She sought asylum in Botswana, where she believed an attempt was made on her life. She then reunited with her immediate family in Israel, before going to England and becoming a Catholic priest. Her decision to become a priest perplexed friends and family. Perhaps her decision was motivated by the Blackfriars, a community of priests in Oxford, and their openness to her being Jewish and an anti-apartheid activist. Because of the Blackfriars’ close ties to Oxford University, Sally completed a master’s degree and nearly finished a Ph.D. dissertation before she left the priesthood.

Sally’s life took a dramatic turn when she discovered she was medically intersex. Her therapist’s advice to spend a year living as a woman was typically given to transgender patients at the time. Sally felt living as a woman “did less violence” to her than living as a man. Some of her friends speculate that today she would have identified as non-binary. Drawing upon the biblical story of Moses asking God who to say sent him, Sally also expressed: “I am who I am.” After a year of medical leave to adopt the name Sally and to embrace what she described as “a female role,” she faced the painful loss of her vocational ministry when she was removed from the priesthood. She returned to South Africa in the 1990s and participated in the life of a Quaker meeting house and “Not in my name,” a collective of anti-Zionist Jews founded by Ronnie Kasrils.

Sally became an intersex activist, driven by concerns for medical and legal harm against intersex people. She argued that the first draft of South Africa’s Civil Union Act (2006) placed intersex people in a predicament because their intimate relationships might technically be neither heterosexual nor same-sex couples. Likewise, policy changes intended to support trans people in South Africa had the potential to require surgery on intersex people. For example, the Alteration of Sex Description Bill was designed to enable trans people to have their birth registers altered to align with their sex. However, the only options included male or female genitalia—congenital or constructed. Sally feared that this would provide fodder for imposing disambiguation surgery on intersex people and render intersex people legally nonpersons.

Sally had personally experienced pressure to align her body with legal terms. When she attempted to renew her South African passport under her female name and sex classification, the South African government suggested her paperwork would be expedited were she to have genital “disambiguation” surgery—either vaginoplasty or phalloplasty. Taking offense to this suggestion, she contacted a human rights lawyer and threatened legal action. Eventually, she obtained government documents in her new name that designated her as female.

In collaboration with the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project and trans activist Estian Smit, Sally lobbied for amendments to the Alteration of Sex Description Bill in 2003. Additionally, she worked with lawyer Fatima Chohan-Khota and scholar Judith Coan to successfully amend the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (PEPUDA) in 2006, by advocating for a legal definition of sex that includes intersex in the broadest possible terms of congenital sexual differentiation. Sally’s contributions to amending South African laws effectively advanced transgender and intersex bodily autonomy and access to rights.

But Sally’s story is not one of an inspirational hero who overcame all odds. Rather, she accomplished some victories but also suffered the precarity that results from pushing to transform society. After she lost her vocation in the priesthood, Sally faced illness and disability without sufficient support. She lacked financial stability, and often felt lonely and isolated. Her experience speaks to the violence many suffer at the hands of medicine, the state, and/or religion. Sally’s suffering and sacrifices illuminate the stakes for moral dissent.

Many of us today feel overwhelmed by the scale of social injustice and are unsure where we fit in. Sally’s physical body, religious life, and activist legacy contest conventional identity categories. Like Sally, you too might not fit a mold, but your contribution to collective movements is needed and valuable. Organizations like InterACT, Intersex Justice Project, IIO Europe, and Intersex South Africa (which Sally founded) continue to work to end medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex infants and children. They offer free resources and can be a place to begin supporting intersex advocacy.

Regardless of whether you consider yourself religious, Sally wanted to mobilize you. The point is not to replicate her story—few of us will flee political persecution, change religious institutions from the inside, discover intersex variations at midlife, or devote ourselves to policy changes. Rather, contemplate what moral action means within your context. We can ask ourselves, as Sally did, what might it mean to embody justice today?

M. Wolff is an Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Augustana College and author of Body Problems: What Intersex Priest Sally Gross Teaches Us About Embodiment, Justice, and Belonging. They are collaborating with geographer Christopher Strunk on a book about queer communities in the Iowa-Illinois Quad Cities.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 65 of The Revealer podcast: “Intersex and Religious.”